Looking for an icon designer

The LibreOffice design team is looking for an experienced icon designer to oversee an effort to create a flat icon set for LibreOffice. The designer wouldn’t have to create any icons (although he would be more than welcome to), he would simply help craft guidelines and act as a mentor and a guide for inexperienced icon designers wanting to contribute.

Would anyone be interested in taking on this role?

There’s no pay, although if a designer wanted some monetary compensation, we could start a Kickstarter project.

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8 thoughts on “Looking for an icon designer”

Description from the wiki page linked: “It’d be great if LibreOffice had its own set of icons, suited for all platforms and themes.” Wrong. It would *not* be great. What *is* great is having icons that adhere to your system icon theme. It would also be ok to have a libreoffice icon theme enabled by default, but having the ability to switch to your system icon theme in the complicated settings dialog.

Right now, LibreOffice does not adhere to your system icon theme — it uses Tango icons on every platform.

Creating a flat monochrome icon set has a number of advantages. It makes icons automatically accessible and eliminates the need for a high-contrast icon set. It makes icons easier to tweak to better fit in with a certain platform or theme, simply by changing color, adding shadows or gloss, etc. And, lastly, these icons are easier to design.

Creating icon sets for each larger platform would be a daunting task. If these icon sets exist already, though, then the user should, of course, have the option of using them.

Adobe use unified icon set for their applications across different platforms. I actually prefer that way as long as the icon set looks neat and modern. Having a unified icon set makes end user much easier to adapt a new platform.

Mozilla team tended to apply different icon sets for Linux, Mac and Windows when they were developing Firefox 3.0. It turned out to be that, although they put a great amount of time and grabbed a lot of public attention, both the Mac and Linux version look awful, somehow native but not exactly.

I am not saying it is completely impossible to design multiple sets of native icons, but considering the fact that each platform actually has its own distinguish philosophy for user interface (global menu for example, or “no-open-save-icon-on-toolbar” rule for Mac), even with native icon sets, it’s still halfway native for the whole application.

The black set would be the base icon set, which would then be made into one gray icon set for light themes, one white icon set for dark themes, and high contrast icon sets. It’s being designed in solid black just so that it’s easy to tweak.

Yes I think LibreOffice should has new iconset. The recent iconset is too oldish, too ancient, and they are not sweet. Mac version of Microsoft Office is a good example. Okay, but I prefer kawoken style then Mac one. Kawoken is here: http://alecive.deviantart.com/art/kAwOken-244166779. Thank you.